Quotes from Heinrich Heine

First poems! They must be written on casual scraps of faded paper, interspersed here and there with withered flowers, or a lock of blond hair, or a discolored piece of ribbon, and the trace of a tear must still be visible in several places ... But first poems that are printed, in livid black and white, on dreadfully smooth paper are poems that have lost the finest points of their sweet, virginal charm, and now arouse a ghastly feeling of distaste in the author.

Where books are burned, in the end, people will eventually burn too

Besides, ghost-stories are even more blood-curdling if you are reading them on a journey, especially at night, in a town, in a house, in a room where you have never been before. How many horrific events may already have taken place on the very spot where you are lying?—that is what you cannot help wondering.

Yes, I know better; God created man so that he might admire the splendour of the world. Every author, be he never so great, wants his work to be praised.

What Christian love cannot do is effected by a common hatred.

You talk of our having an idea; we do not have an idea. The idea has us, and martyrs us, and scourges us, and drives us into the arena to fight and die for it, whether we want to or not.

We keep on deceiving ourselves in regard to our faults, until we at last come to look upon them as virtues.

God will forgive me the foolish remarks I have made about Him just as I will forgive my opponents the foolish things they have written about me, even though they are spiritually as inferior to me as I to thee, O God!

The real madness probably is not another thing that the wisdom itself that, tired of discovering the shames of the world, has taken the intelligent resolution to become mad.

Pretty women without religion are like flowers without perfume.

The years keep coming and going, Men will arise & depart; Only one thing is immortal: The love that is in my heart.

The men of action are, after all, only the unconscious instruments of the men of thought.